Penn Central Transportation

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Penn Central Transportation Company was the colossal northeastern railroad born from the February 1, 1968 merger of the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central Railroad. The company also absorbed the troubled New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad’s properties at the end of 1968. Its routes linked major industrial cities from the Atlantic seaboard to Chicago—an enormous machine assembled just as the rails were getting rough.

Philadelphia was the command post, with the company’s principal office in the Transportation Center Building at Six Penn Center Plaza. The black-and-red “PC” emblem was clean, modern, and almost suspiciously confident for a railroad trying to weld together rival empires, duplicate routes, aging infrastructure, and very different corporate cultures.

On June 21, 1970, Penn Central entered bankruptcy reorganization, then the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history. Passenger service was soon reshaped by Amtrak, while the railroad’s viable freight and rail assets moved to Consolidated Rail Corporation—Conrail—on April 1, 1976. A short run, a huge footprint, and one legendary corporate derailment.

Our Penn Central Transportation collection celebrates the stark geometry, electric-era ambition, and beautifully ill-fated confidence of a railroad built to be the future—then rapidly became a cautionary tale in excellent graphic design.